- StarkWare has revealed that it is working on a new prover.
- The new prover called Stwo promises to improve the experience of developers and users significantly.
- Before now, Starknet’s sequencer had also undergone an overhaul.
To address its scaling limitations, Ethereum has increasingly relied on rollup solutions over the past few years. Amid the rollup boom, the zero-knowledge approach is quickly emerging as the leading path to scale the network primarily due to its greater security guarantees.
Over the past 24 hours, StarkWare, the developers of the Starknet blockchain and one of the leading ZK developers in the Ethereum Layer 2 space, has announced that it is working on a new prover that promises to bolster efficiency not just in the Starknet ecosystem but also the entire ZK space.
Starknet’s Stwo: New “Blazing-Fast” Prover
On Thursday, February 29, StarkWare announced that it was working on a new “blazing-fast” cryptographic prover called Stwo, which the team asserts would be open-source from day one.
The defining trait of ZK-rollups like Starknet is that they rely on cryptographic proofs to validate transactions on the Ethereum network without revealing all their details. A prover typically generates these proofs in a highly computer-intensive process. As such, a crucial part of the scalability of ZK-rollups, regarding transaction speed and costs, depends on the efficiency of the prover’s proving system.
Sponsored
In the case of Stwo, StarkWare notes that it would implement the recently unveiled Circle STARK proving system developed together with Polygon Labs, the developers of the Polygon PoS chain, and the Polygon zkEVM. At the time of the Circle STARK announcement, StarkWare developer Shahar Papini tipped the proving system as the fastest in the world.
In addition to the Circle STARK, StarkWare also notes that it makes several optimizations to guarantee the best possible results. According to the team, Stwo’s efficiency would translate to an optimized developer experience and even faster and cheaper user transactions.
Sponsored
Stwo is an improvement to StarkWare’s first-generation prover Stone, which is widely used in the Starknet ecosystem. According to developers, no change will be required from users of Stone to leverage the benefits of Stwo when they roll it out.
Stwo is one of two major technological upgrades that StarkWare has unveiled for Starknet in the past year.
Starknet Undergoing an Overhaul?
In July 2023, StarkWare unveiled a version 12 upgrade to overhaul Starknet’s sequencer, which batches transactions off the Layer 1 chain. According to the team, the move promised a 100 times improvement in the sequencer’s efficiency, significantly boosting the network’s overall throughput.
According to L2Beat data at the time of writing, Starknet is the fourth-largest Ethereum Layer 2 by TVL, with $1.26 billion. The network has seen a TVL boost in recent weeks following the release of its STRK token.
On the Flipside
- The release date for Stwo remains unclear.
- Polygon’s Plonky 3 prover will also feature the Circle STARK proving system.
Why This Matters
Stwo promises significant benefits to developers and users in the ZK-rollup space.
Read this for more on Starknet’s new proving system:
How Polygon (MATIC)-Backed Proving System Bolsters ZK L2s
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